Reserved words are treated as special symbols and not subject to normal scoping rules in many languages, including Ada which served as the model for PL/SQL. Try defining "function begin" or "function end" in PL/SQL for two other examples of reserved words not allowed as identifiers. That's why they're called "reserved" ...
(hope I don't come across as being too annoying, in my evil past I was a professional compiler writer)
"update" wasn't allowed even in 8i, and aD knew it (there's a comment in one of the packages saying that "'edit' is used as a name because Oracle won't let us use 'update'"
So it's a bit distressing to hear Jon mention that arguments against the use of "delete" and other reserved words that were incorrectly being allowed was ignored.
Oh well...we'll change 'em to "remove" or something.
